thoughts on the life and culture of independent schools

06/13/2010

Inattentional Blindness

"Inattentional blindness" is a phrase that references what happens when, in our case, a school is so focused on item X that it is entirely unaware of item Y, the latter being some sort of fault or glaring omission.

I'm doing an online graduate certificate program in Advanced Project Management, what one instructor said should be termed more appropriately "Organizational Engineering." I have to agree with him; it's about culture and strategy as much as the execution of a portfolio of projects. Most folks taking the course are from the Fortune 500 world, although there are a few educators or executive directors of non-profits. The instructor used the phrase "inattentional blindness" to describe companies who are focused so intently on one aspect of operations that they miss--quite entirely--what might be the real culprit causing their under-performance, their drop in sales, etc.

Permit me to translate the phrase into a more school-friendly situation. Imagine a school that is losing students, where parent complaints are the norm (as opposed to parent praise), where the program hasn't kept pace with developments in education. In that same school, the board has a single focus: finances. If they can get the finances right, it stands to reason (to them) that the school will be successful once again. Finances, they would argue, are the key to the school's viability.